WHICH HOLLYWOOD MOVIE STAR'S MOTHER-- -privately dressed him as a girl until he was 10 or older? -hated the Kennedys, Frank Sinatra, and Sammy Davis, Jr? -declared Mahatma Gandhi a "fake"? -called Mussolini "Musso" for short? -became pregnant by her husband's superior officer? -was rumored to have been "dusky" (half-Indian)? -was an equal-opportunity racist? -married two men who committed suicide, and two who didn't? -shot a man dead--and no charges were ever pressed? -rode an elephant all over Hollywood, with a sign saying "Vote for Nixon"? -took up with a young man 50 years her junior? -died under very mysterious circumstances--and had her autobiography serialized in "National Enquirer"? -was devastatingly charming? -has a new play based on her autobiography, BITCH!, opening at FringeNYC in August, 5 performances only, at the Connelly Theatre? For tickets: www.fringenyc.org
When I list the rumors and facts like that, it makes me wish I could see a show about her! I guess that's why I started this particular ball rolling in the first place. . .Grrrrr. Back to my re-writes.
PS: WHICH ACTRESS/PLAYWRIGHT WANNA-BE USED TO TELL HER STUDENTS THAT THAT UNPLEASANT SENSATION WAS EXCITEMENT, NOT TERROR?! Oh,Brother!
One of the reasons I started this project in the first place was to get myself on the other side of the table in the audition room. Originally, I didn't plan to be playing Lady Lawford. I know it's hard to believe, but I don't think I'm ideal for this role--I imagined someone older, British, elegant--maybe even bitchy.
But since I'm primarily an actor, not a "real" writer, it's easier for me to see the strengths and weaknesses of the script from the inside. At least that's the premise I'm working from now--so I'm playing Lady Lawford this time. (performance dates below).
And as the playwright I DID find myself on the other side of the casting table this week, with Melinda Buckley, our director, and Melissa Doyle, our producer, listening to actors play the piano, sing, and act their hearts out. They were terrifically unique: solid performers, some so handsome it hurt to look at them, some wonderful singers, some better pianists, and a couple were stars-in-the-making who just didn't happen to fit into this play. I am grateful to them all.
These auditions confirmed all the corny stuff I used to tell my students--the auditors REALLY want you to be good, to solve their casting problem, to be the ONE. And even if they think they've found the ONE, they want you to show them something even better, even more unique, to re-define who the ONE is. I'll try to practice what I preach next time I audition. It's hard to remember on the actor's side of the table.
SO: Who is the ONE? The adorable, brilliant Joe Kinosian--composer, pianist, singer, musical director, actor--and who knows what else!? He just clicked.
Joe was recommended by Kevin Chamberlin, star of DIRTY BLONDE, SEUSSICAL, CHICAGO, and the upcoming ADDAMS FAMILY on Broadway. Kevin's a friend whom I met almost twenty years ago in an early Doug Wright play called DINOSAURS, at Yale Rep. He played Magic Moses, a Christian wrestler, and I played Candy Faye Kafka, a country singer so changed by plastic surgery her own mother doesn't recognise her. Even back then, Doug Wright was brilliant. (DINOSAURS is a story in itself--one of those shows that form real friendships. I'm still in touch with Kevin, Doug, Marylouise Burke, and Bill Mesnik, all from then.)
So nice that Lady Lawford's Buddy is a friend of a friend!
Our world--the world of theatre--is small and grows smaller every day. Good or bad, I find that more and more reassuring, the older I get.
The Lucky/Shameless/Dragon Part:
Bitch! (The Autobiography of Lady Lawford, as told to Buddy Galon) The Connelly Theater, 220 East 4th St (Ave. A & B) MON 8/17 @ 10:00-11:35PM THUR 8/20 @ 4:45-6:20PM SAT 8/22 @ 7:00-8:35PM SUN 8/23 @ 2:30-4:05PM FRI 8/28 @ 7:00-8:35PM
Ticket info: www.fringenyc.org
BUY THEM IN ADVANCE! WE WILL SELL OUT, AS IT'S ONLY A 99-SEATER! AND SELLING OUT EARLY GIVES BETTER BUZZ--HELP A BITCH OUT, OK?!!
Shame (ME,fr OE scamu; akin to OHG scama shame; bef. 12c) 1 a: a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, short-coming, or impropriety b: the susceptibility to such emotion 2 a condition of humiliating disgrace or disrepute : IGNOMINY 3 a: something that brings censure or reproach; also: something to be regretted: PITY "it'd be a ~ if you missed the party" b: a cause of feeling shame
Lately I've been drumming up momentum, interest, and funds for BITCH!, which I guess could be considered Self-Promotion. After all, I wrote it, am re-writing it, and will be in it. But somehow the idea of self-promotion seems incomplete without the adjective "shameless".
I wonder why promoting my play makes me blush--Am I immodest? shameless? bound for hell? Why is it so guilt-inducing?!
Just the word "shame" takes me back to a specific gesture my mother, grandmother, aunts, and uncles used: The Forefinger Rub. When we were very small, and did something BAD, usually fibbing (or "storying", as my family put it), they would accompany the forefinger gesture not with "Shame, shame", but "Shamie, Shamie"--as if giving our shame a nickname made it cute. Even as a kid it made me wanna puke.
So I googled the Shame Gesture, and found:
"It implies a superior position from sender to receiver and is sign of friction, which was derived from pointing. Professor Mark Knapp of the University of Texas says,"the whittling motion of the non-pointing finger indicates friction. Making this gesture toward someone indicates 'you are causing trouble between us!'"
The gesture seems to be fairly recent and is limited almost entirely to North America. They've got a similar gesture in Wales, but they make a sawing motion with the non-pointing finger. And in parts of Mexico, rubbing one index finger across the other is considered obscene! "Shamie-Shamie!", I thought, till I read:
"We all deserve to have this gesture applied to us, because we all fall short of God's standards. Shame and guilt are what we should receive. Now, if you take that shame gesture and stop the stroking down the finger half-way you get a cross shape as your two index fingers overlay each other."
Nun-uh. I think it's a gesture intended to brush something off of ourselves--pointing to another and sloughing something off--maybe unwanted attention, maybe DIS-grace, maybe our own shame. You know, a sort of "I am rubber, you are glue" from adults to children.
But if you're truly shameless, can you still blush? Am I "story-ing" by writing a play? Does that make me shameless? And, ever notice how well the word shameless goes with Bitch?
The "Get Lucky"(Ruth Gordon)/"Be a Dragon" (Geraldine Page) news:
-WE REACHED OUR KICKSTARTER.com GOAL!!--but are gratefully accepting donations online till July 15 and offline thereafter. We still need about $2,000. And we would be proud if you'd spread the word. -I am re-writing like crazy, and un-re-writing like an even crazier person. -Casting for Buddy is July 13. Know any young actors who are adorable, incredibly talented 20-somethings, and who play a mean piano? -Performance dates will be confirmed on July 11, but looks like they'll be between August 17 and 28th, 5 performances only, at the Connelly. -AND we're putting together the rest of TEAM BITCH! and would welcome volunteers. Check out www.andsoshedid.com---Come join us!
Last week I went to Woodstock to visit my friend Gillian Farrell for a couple of days, to shake things up, try to get a new perspective on "Bitch!", and to shoot a short film of me as Lady Lawford, directed by Gillian.
She was a young actress in Geraldine Page's class with me all those years ago--lovely, slim, blonde, smart, talented--I wonder we ever became friends at all, but Gillian had the knack of making people--even someone as self-conscious as I was--feel comfortable.
It didn't help that my best male friends from class, John Outlaw and Edward Blanchard, REALLY liked her. The three of them were way cooler than I was. Both guys did scenes with her, and with me, too, but Gillian and I never worked together, probably because I was too intimidated. She was the kind of girl I always wanted to be.
She wore groovy vintage clothes, knew celebrities, had wicker furniture, and lived on the upper West side in a great apartment building owned by a wacky former vaudevillian--just like all those old movies that made me want to move to New York--and her day job was fabulous. She was a detective.
When Gillian's detective agency needed to hire another actress/detective, she recommended me. Five nights a week we'd don blue maid's uniforms and head to a mid-town office building to spy on crooked yuppies who apparently had been ripping off their employers, an investment banking firm, returning after-hours to do whatever it was that warranted hiring two actresses to spy on them. I never did know for sure. We carried photos of the crooks in our uniform pockets, with cans of Pledge and dirty rags as a cover, and pretended to be Yugoslavian cleaning women. Our real cover was a duo of actual Yugoslavian cleaning women who had ratted on the yuppie crooks in the first place. Intrepid, they kept the other maids from reporting us to the Maids Union, or worse, speaking to us in Croatian (neither of us knew a word). It was clear we didn't belong there. But it was a fun job, very Lucy and Ethel.
By day, between auditions, I served subpoenas. Gillian's other assignments as an "op" were more challenging and dangerous, and--well, she was better at it than I was. Braving dicey neighborhoods to hand legal documents to scary people proved too much for me. I was relieved to land a job in a Charles Busch play by night, and an upper East side real estate office by day. My brief stint as a lady detective became just another anecdote: What I Did For Money.
But Gillian's gumshoes really took her places. She met a sexy writer who was working on a detective novel, married him, had children, wrote some detective novels herself, and moved to Woodstock after living abroad, directing, and of course, acting. Now her husband is a respected, well-known writer, her kids are gorgeous, and she looks just the same only better--still acts, writes, does charity and political work, and has become a film-maker.
So twenty-two years later, the actress/detectives once again played dress-up and catch-up, and worked together, alone.
Sadly, our dear friends John and Edward are both gone--John died in 1993 and Edward last September. Gillian and I are unexpected survivors. We have finally created something together, however small, after all these years. I'm looking forward to collaborating with her again before another twenty-odd years pass by. And I hope that John and Edward are smiling.
As I said before, blogging is embarrassing. More embarrassing than THAT is asking for money for my FringeNYC project, BITCH!, the play based on Lady Lawford's book.
We have a little more than two weeks to raise the rest of $3500--Team Bitch has raised about $2700 of that goal, with more than a little help from our friends. For more info about the fundraising and the really cool rewards for donating, check out www.kickstarter.com/projects/1663327260/lets-kickstart-this-bitch-my-play-i-mean.
My brand new website is up, www.andsoshedid.com, with more info about the play. And in a few days, we'll unveil a short film by Gillian Farrell, with yours truly as Lady Lawford.
Melinda Buckley, our intrepid director, is getting ready to hold auditions for the role of Buddy (know a great young actor in his twenties who's a piano wiz?); Melissa Doyle, our producer, is rounding up rehearsal space and a staff (contact us if you know a great stage mgr or lighting designer--fun guaranteed, but not a lot of $$).
FringeNYC has told us we'll be at the Connelley Theatre on East 4th Street--exact dates TBA next week, but definitely several dates between August 14-30.
SO--everything's in motion--but if we don't meet or exceed the $3500 goal on Kickstarter.com, we don't get any of that money at all. And we actually need more than that to put the play up. Whew. Think good thoughts and spread the word, will you, to anyone you think this may interest or amuse!?
Thanks for your support; we'll see you on the Fringe!
A million years ago, or, more precisely, twenty-five, I was a student in Geraldine Page's acting class in New York.
I was glued to the seat behind her most weeks, because I was awe-struck and terrified and because Geraldine Page could read my mind. Or, like our best teachers, our mothers, she had convinced me that she could, and I was taking no chances.
I first encountered Geraldine Page onscreen at a military moviehouse on Okinawa. My father, a Sergeant in the Air Force, managed the base theatre, so I saw almost every American film released the two and a half years we lived overseas. I had seen Summer and Smoke, Sweet Bird of Youth, and Toys in the Attic by the time I was ten. Two Tennessee Williams and one Lillian Hellman, our Southern masters. I didn't know they were playwrights. The only plays I had seen were in movies.
Watchingthose films for the first time was thrilling: characters and language I recognized from my own family background, and this woman who was familiar--she even looked like she could be in my family--except she was on the big screen, sometimes plain, sometimes pretty, only real, acting with movie stars, but not one, transcending reality, doing and saying things I knew I could do. Maybe not as well, not yet, but someday.
I told my mother that I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. "I want to be like that lady in Summer in Smoke", I said. We were sitting in our beat-up old black Ford, in front of our Quonset hut home. "I think I can do that."
My mother tossed her cigarette out the window and spoke in her can-do voice. "You are every BIT as cute as Pamela Tiffin!", she said.
Hunh. I thought it best to keep my bigger ambitions to myself from then on.
Back to 1984. I had just finished some scene, and was waiting for Geraldine's critique, hoping she wouldn't tell me I reminded her of Pamela Tiffin. She leaned in. I took a breath.
"You're so-- Niiiiice. You want Everyone to-- Liiiiike you." (The smarmiest reading of that you can imagine.) And then in her lower register: "I was a nice girl from the Midwest, too. I loved being a heroine onstage. I didn't want to alienate the audience in Sweet Bird. I didn't want them to hate me. But the moment I realized that the meaner I was the more they loved me, I was Free. Don't apologize. The audience loves a dragon. Be a Dragon."
I'm still finding my Bitch-y shoes. They are not comfortable anyplace but at home. I wasn't wearing them at the reading of my play the other day, and I don't know when I'll break them out in public. Soon, I hope. Maybe if I wear them while I do the re-writes, they'll be broken in just in time for performance. Right now I'm still barefoot.
While schmoozing at the Book Expo, handing out flyers for BITCH! the play (and for Branden Books, the publisher of Lady Lawford's autobiography), I met a woman who told me that a friend of hers had had an affair with Peter Lawford. "Well, not an affair", she said,"more of a one-night stand". She said she couldn't reveal any details--but that it had been a wild night ("you know how one-night stands are")-- I raised an eyebrow, hoping I looked like I knew.
"You don't have to tell me", I assured her, "but let me tell you about his mother." I've been intimately acquainted with Lady Lawford these past four years; I think I've read everything that has been published about her, most of it uncomplimentary, some of it screamingly funny. I like her. (I have to; I'm playing her.)
I trotted out the titillating stuff: that Lady Lawford pretended to have been married only twice; that two of her husbands committed suicide; that she was disgusted by sex; that she hated the Kennedys; that she dressed Peter as a girl until he was nine or ten or twelve, depending on who you believe--
She gasped. "Well, that explains a lot", she said, "because my friend told me---" and she revealed the sordid details of her friend's one-night-stand with Peter Lawford. And it was reeeeally good gossip, with just enough of the ring of truth. You know what I mean.
Suddenly I felt so guilty, standing in the Javits Center, talking trash about a man I'd never met--a grey-haired dreamboat I had a crush on as a little girl, the "Fella with the Umbrella", that handsome English guy on 60's gameshows, President Kennedy's pal.
Poor Peter Lawford: a beautiful boy born to a wildly narcissistic mother, unsure about his paternity, tossed into stupefyingly adult situations and expected to perform--which he did, all over the world, most notably and successfully in Hollywood. He fit perfectly into the MGM star-making system. Groomed by his mother to be the perfect escort, worthy of royalty--he married into America's first family, forever holding the coat for a starlet or an in-law or a Rat Packer. And he somehow maintained the illusion of savoir-faire and good humor until drugs and alcohol got the best of him.
It's a tricky business, this "as told to" stuff.
There are several fascinating books about Peter Lawford, but by far the best-written, most insightful, is by his son, Christopher Kennedy Lawford. And it's not just about his father--it spans the legacy of the Kennedys and the Lawfords, detailing a chemical predisposition to addiction, and the power of family expectations. It's a story of survival everyone can relate to, SYMPTOMS OF WITHDRAWAL, and it's a hell of a read.
But I beg you---please read it after you see my little play! If you read it before seeing BITCH!, I'm afraid you'll find it almost impossible to laugh.
BITCH! is a play based on the Autobiography of Lady Lawford--which premiered at FringeNYC August, 2009. I continue to add to the blog as the spirit moves me.
